Business Enterprises are dependent on computing system environments for maintaining their business continuity. Such business enterprises can be broadly termed as IT enterprises. The existence of IT enterprises is dependent on their Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Management infrastructure and its effective implementation.
Disaster Recovery is the process of reinstituting access to data, application, and hardware systems that are critical to resume business operations in the wake of a disaster that has disrupted normal business operations. A Disaster Recovery Plan should include information that not only pertains to the resumption of normal systematic operations post disaster, but should also consider other factors such as, not being limited to, meeting a desired Recovery Point Objective (“RPO”) and/or meeting a desired Recovery Time Objective (“RTO”), affordability, ease, robustness, reliability, and manageability thereof.
RPO generally refers to an acceptable amount of data loss measured in time relative to when a disaster occurs. More particularly, RPO may represent the point in time from which an IT enterprise should be able to recover stored data. For example, if an IT enterprise establishes the RPO as two hours, the enterprise should be able to recover any stored data that exists at least two hours prior to the disaster.
Information Technology (IT) data centers have hundreds of enterprise applications and many of them are critical for business and are expected to maintain RPO (Recovery Point Objective) goals to ensure business continuity. As number of applications increase, it becomes critical that RPO goals are managed and monitored across the data centers.
To this end, systems and methods for monitoring and maintaining Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are available which involve manual intervention to implement corrective actions in cases of RPO violations/RPO deviations in an IT enterprise. Such systems and methods, apart from requiring extensive technical knowledge of all the components used in the Disaster Recovery solution, also adds to the costs for the IT enterprises that implement such Disaster Recovery solutions. Further, manual intervention is prone to erroneous operations which can be detrimental for business continuity of the IT enterprises using such solutions.
Automated systems are also available for maintaining RPO levels across the data centers of IT enterprises which comprise inputting an RPO value for the solution, calculating a real time RPO value for the solution and making the real time RPO value equal to the input RPO value. However, till date, no automated measures are available that proactively and intelligently alter and adjust the replication parameters of the replicators to maintain consistent RPO levels across the data centers of IT enterprises.
Accordingly, there is a need for a cost effective, affordable, easy, robust, reliable, and manageable system and method for proactively and intelligently monitoring and maintaining RPO levels across the data centers based on the RPO goals of the IT enterprises.
The present invention, therefore, aims at overcoming the aforesaid limitations by providing system and method for proactively and intelligently monitoring and maintaining consistent RPO levels across the data centers based on the RPO goals of the IT enterprises by altering and adjusting the replication rates of the application(s) based on the RPO goals of the IT enterprises.